“Within this poem there is definitely a sense of disclosing a long-held secret – a secret desire, perhaps – that fantasy of rummaging in the Blue Peter Badges, whatever that might mean. It’s as if the speaker has finally found their moment to say something, so they are going to say it all, let it spill out.”
Category: Poems
Damian Walford Davies: How I Wrote ‘Selves’
“I hope there are fleeting readerly moments at the end of, and between, lines throughout the volume where the stomach jumps or the mind reaches for something that doesn’t quite materialise around the racing bend of the line, or materialises in an uncannily different form.”
Simon Maddrell: How I Wrote ‘Being Young & Queer: A Zuihitsu’
“Language is culture, history, social practice, politics, everything. It is both a product and source of all those things, and its loss is all the greater for it”
Nadine El-Enany: How I Wrote ‘Hobson’s choice’
“The beginning of a poem matters to me very much. I want to pull the reader right into the thicket. My favourite poems are those that snag me from the first line and make it impossible to pull myself free.”
A Poem for St Dwynwen’s Day
Courtesy of Isabelle Evans
Tracey Rhys: How I Wrote ‘He tells me how trees communicate…’
“I think that when we have children, many of us tend to turn the natural world into fairyland for a while, and share their entrancement with it.”
Sarah Wimbush ‘STRIKE’
Sarah Wimbush’s new collection ‘STRIKE’ features two poems from Poetry Wales 59.1 and launches at the National Coal Mining Museum on Sunday 28th January
Astra Papachristodoulou: How I Wrote ‘Unbodied’
“Given [the constraint of short form], I like to utilise materials that, in conjunction with the short text, offer additional meaning to ultimately make the poems multi-layered, esoteric and more nuanced”
Daljit Nagra: How I Wrote ‘We’re Lighting Up The Nation’
“I didn’t want to be a poet who knocks out book after book of ‘auto-pilot’ poems, so I stopped writing the thirty-line poem and sought something that would challenge me. I waited to be astonished by something different.”